Sales Enablement Strategies that Enhance Buyer Enablement

Unlock the secrets to transforming your sales enablement approach to align with modern buyer needs.

Before we tackle the topic of sales enablement, we need to recognize where we are now. We have left the Era of the Solution, as every sales organization that will work for their clients. To believe otherwise, your competitors would fail to win their fair share of deals. It is a mistake when buyers and decision-makers have moved into a new era.

We have been in the Era of Decision-Making for quite some time, even though most sales organizations don’t pay attention to the changes in our ever-evolving landscape. This article will help you to understand why your sales enablement must change so your contacts can make a rare, strategic change to their business. Your sales enablement is what causes your sales team to sit next to your contacts and decision-makers and be able to help them make a significant change.

Reduce Ineffective Sales Enablement Practices

When you onboard new salespeople, you are safe to spend less time enabling your new sales reps to promote your company. Few, if any, decision-makers will be interested in a history lesson about your company. You may also reduce or remove the amount of time you spend talking about your largest clients, showing off a screen of their logos like a trophy case.

You should only spend a very small amount of time on these legacy strategies because your prospective clients do not find these conversations helpful for their change initiative or the better results they are pursuing. Because you have been in the Era of the Solution for some time, you know how to enable a legacy conversation. But the truth is that you don’t need to know your solution inside and out. Instead, you need to enable your client to make a decision.

By spending less time on topics that buyers find to be wastes of time, you can emphasize the sales enablement your team needs to succeed in the Era of Decision-Making.

Enhance Sales Enablement for Buyer Decision-Making

To develop sales enablement that will enhance buyer enablement, it is important for you to recognize that you are responsible for ensuring your buyers and stakeholders are able to make the best decision, one that will improve their results.

Sales Enablement 1: Employ Strategic Empathy: Strategic empathy is a way to think about buyers and their responsibility. Most salespeople believe their clients know more than they actually know. For their part, buyers know they don’t know everything they need to know. Depending on the nature of the client’s challenges and its importance, buyers worry about making a mistake.

Sales Enablement 2: Address What Buyers Can’t Know: At the core of sales enablement is an awareness of what you know that your contacts can’t know. We call salespeople who have greater knowledge and experience than their clients One-Up. (See Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative.) Being One-Up comes with the obligation to enable the buyers by sharing information and insights that they are missing, as they rarely make these types of decisions.

Sales Enablement 3: Ask Open-Ended Questions: Even though the salesperson must be One-Up, they are also One-Down, as their clients know much more about their company and what they need to do to succeed. By asking open-ended questions to learn what they need to be able to change. If there is one thing salespeople fail in discovery, it is learning what they will need to know how to help the client with the decision, and what changes they may need to be able to generate their desired outcomes.

Sales Enablement 4: Help Clients Weigh Factors: There are certain factors that will determine what the client may need to do to succeed. The open-ended questions tend to identify the factors that will impact the decision. To help your contacts to make the decision, you may have to help your client weigh certain factors. Some part of this may include your solution and its fit. This enablement can help prevent losing deals by working on the fit and what you may have to customize for the client.

Sales Enablement 5: Build Consensus Early: Of all the tasks of enabling buyers, creating consensus may be the most difficult. The larger the potential deal size, the more you will find stakeholders from all areas of the company weighing in on the decision and the solution. Even though this is fifth on the list, you should start pursuing consensus as early as possible. If one is incredibly lucky, your sales champion, what we call “the CEO of the Problem” has the relationships and a charge to make change.

Sales Enablement 6: Utilize a Consultative Approach: A consultative approach is one that has the salesperson offering their advice and recommendations, leading their client through their buyer’s journey.

We spend much time enabling salespeople to win deals. Much of what shows up in sales enablement isn’t designed to enable the buyer with what they need to succeed. It has never been more important that sales enablement enables the buyer to change. The sales reps that are able to enable their clients will win more relationships and business.

Leaving this article, assess your sales enablement by how much it will help the client to acquire what they need to make an effective decision, one that ensures they are able to reach their goals.

Do good work, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.